The present invention generally relates to methods of making books and the books themselves and more particularly relates to methods of making personalized children's storybooks using stickers placed on various preprinted pages of a storybook.
Various methods of making "personalized" children's storybooks--i.e., storybooks in which personal information about the child recipient is incorporated in the story line text--have been proposed and are known in the art. One previously proposed method has been to obtain personalized information pertaining to the intended child recipient, incorporate the personalized information in the story line text, print the personalized text on loose book pages, and then bind the printed pages to form a personalized storybook. While this one-at-a-time method of creating a personalized children's storybook results in a totally personalized book, it is also quite cumbersome and relatively expensive.
A sticker-based improvement in this method of making a personalized children's storybook is illustrated and described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,190,316 to Hefty and is carried out by preprinting a nonpersonalized children's storybook in which the various pages bound into the preprinted book have both nonvariable and variable textual portions. As preprinted, the storybook is complete as to its story line, but may be personalized by obtaining personal information relating to the intended child recipient of the finished book and incorporating the obtained information into textual portions printed on stickers disposed on a peel-off sticker sheet.
The variable text portions disposed on the preprinted book pages are typically located in colored areas of their associated pages which are bounded by a guide periphery having a shape identical to that of the personalized text sticker to be adhered thereto over the variable text. Once each sticker is so adhered, the sticker covers and hides the variable text, and replaces it with the personalized text on the sticker. In order to maintain the overall color scheme of the page on which each sticker is adhered, and hide the variable text which it covers, each sticker is opaque and has a color substantially identical to the guide periphery-bounded page area to which it will be adhered.
While this sticker-based method desirably permits the preprinted book to be personalized after it is purchased and given to the child recipient, the method carries with it several problems, limitations and disadvantages. For example, since the opaque stickers must be precisely aligned with the bordered variable text areas which they are designed to cover, care must be taken to properly adhere the stickers to their associated page areas to avoid exposing some of the underlying variable text and/or giving the in-place stickers undesirable misaligned appearances in the subsequently personalized storybook. This potential sticker misalignment problem is particularly acute when a small child attempts to personalize his new book.
Additionally, the necessity to match the colors of the various stickers with the variable text page areas which they will ultimately cover typically requires that separate supplies of sticker sheets, with differently colored stickers thereon, be inventoried to accommodate preprinted books with different story lines and art work therein. Because of this requirement, a seller of preprinted books with various story lines and illustrations therein can easily run out of sticker sheets for one or more of the books, while winding up with an oversupply of sticker sheets for other preprinted books in his inventory.
In view of the foregoing it can be seen that it would be desirable to provide an improved sticker-based method for personalizing a preprinted children's storybook. It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide such an improved method and a children's storybook made thereby.